At its best, this creates a landscape at once realistic and fantastic, inhabited by characters whose eccentricities make...
Plainspoken, sharply observed collection from O. Henry Award–winner Averill (The Slow Air of Ewan Macpherson, 2003, etc.), first in a new series focused on the nation’s heartland.
A dozen stories explore the unexpected moments, surprises, shocks and setbacks of daily life in Kansas, a place where “late summer has its own rhythm of days, as dawn moves more slowly into the sky, as corn swells and stiffens in the fields.” The author writes of couples like Harry and Mavis, who while expecting their first child observe a naked man running with a herd of deer that visits their land some mornings. The sense of wonder this creates eases Harry’s transformation to fatherhood in some mysterious way. “Topeka Underground” is a midcentury fable about the artist’s place in a conforming society. A white-bearded man and his tiny wife live in the basement of an unfinished house in a new suburban development. Despite his father’s warnings to stay away, a young boy who lives nearby is drawn to the older couple by their unkempt lawn and eccentric habits. Once he discovers the treasures they’ve created, he realizes how extraordinary they are. “The Onion and I,” another father-son tale, compares the earthiness of growing onions to the aridity of cyberspace. Some of these pieces are brief: “A Story as Preface: Running Blind” takes only a page to show a runner teaching a blind friend, who soon outstrips him; and “The Summer Grandma Was Supposed to Die” is almost as spare, although this account of a young boy being bitten by a rattlesnake is marred by an unnecessary last sentence. The most fully realized story, “During the Twelfth Summer of Elmer D. Peterson,” takes up many of Averill’s characteristic elements—a solitary young boy, a rule-setting father, a grandfatherly figure who fosters rebellion, and a powerful natural setting—and polishes them to a fine point.
At its best, this creates a landscape at once realistic and fantastic, inhabited by characters whose eccentricities make them fully human.Pub Date: April 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-8032-1068-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.
Eighty-six-year-old Neider, a much-acclaimed Mark Twain scholar and Antarctica explorer (The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, 1956, filmed as One-Eyed Jacks), presents two short novels, apparently his first published fiction since the ill-advised A Visit to Yazoo (1956).
In the title story, George Barber, an American nature photographer, flies to McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, the site of Mount Erebus with its fiery lake of molten lava, then boards an icebreaker, The Penguin, captained by Jack Torneau, who unaccountably takes a dislike to his passenger. Humiliatingly, the photographer is quartered not with fellow observers but in a far-off, dark, cramped rack with only a red light to see by. It’s a poor place to experience the gloriously described Southern Ocean, which has the world’s worst, most turbulent waters. Is the rather girlish captain, who has a weak stomach, fearful that Barber’s photos will expose his femininity? At the Grotto Berg itself, a spectacular thing with Roman arches so big the ship can actually sail into them, Barber gets his photos but disaster befalls the ship. In the companion novella, The Left Eye Cries First, Sid Little, 63, an early-retired Long Island attorney, has his second bar mitzvah and—at the urging of a friend’s lingering but fatal illness, and also of a dream of his homeland—decides that Gorbachev being in power is a sign that he should return to Ukraine. Sid hasn’t been there since his family fled the country when he was 11. His trip brings back rich memories of his Russian-Jewish childhood and early sexual experiences, there and in Paris. When he comes home to his still-alive but dying friend, his own health reassures him.
Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8154-1123-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
While all of Schmitt’s stories are well worth reading, when an ironic conclusion becomes predictable (à la O. Henry), it...
Illuminating stories about the everyday—self-image, problematic relationships, the need for love—marred only by Schmitt’s unfortunate tendency to use heavy-handed irony in the stories’ conclusions.
In the first story, “The Dreamer from Ostend,” we meet an author, also the narrator, recently disappointed in love. Spending time in Ostend because he’s attracted by the exoticism of the name, he meets Emma Van A, the elderly aunt of his landlady, who has spent all of her life among her thousands of books and whose direct experience of life seems limited. Her reading has been confined exclusively to the classics, her greatest literary love being Homer. To the narrator she begins to spin a story of her past, one more than a little tinged with an eroticism that seems out of keeping with her staid present. After exploring the thin line between fact and fiction, Schmitt doesn’t leave his story tantalizingly ambiguous but instead clunkily confirms the existence of Emma’s lover. In “Perfect Crime”—almost Hitchcockian in its plot—Gabrielle de Sarlat becomes convinced that her husband of many years can’t possibly be as good as he seems. A “triggering” event brought about by a usually astute neighbor has persuaded Gabrielle that her husband is nothing more than a hypocrite hiding his numerous lovers, so she murders him. Although a witness to the crime exists, she’s exculpated...but eventually realizes her mistake. “Getting Better” introduces us to Stéphanie, a nurse taking care of a handsome man who’s been terribly injured in an accident. Stéphanie has never found herself attractive, but despite his blindness he convinces her she’s beautiful based on her voice and her delicate scent. His flattery leads to a transformation.
While all of Schmitt’s stories are well worth reading, when an ironic conclusion becomes predictable (à la O. Henry), it subverts its own desire to surprise.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-933372-81-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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